Indisputably Simpler Times

(Originally published 8/1/11)

Often with my tongue firmly planted in cheek, but not always, I am wont to make reference to “simpler times.” However, in this particular recollection of what was, the jury is unanimous: Simpler times indeed.

Kingsbridge in the Bronx’s last remaining victory garden on the northwest corner of W232nd Street and Tibbett Avenue survived the tumultuous 1960s. Simpler times—in the antithesis of simpler times for the country at large—were still possible back then. It’s just the way things were, beginning with the real estate agent who gave my grandfather and several locals permission to plant a garden on multiple empty lots up for sale and owned by two different people. "Keep the place clean" was all he asked of them.

So, yes, these men with the green thumbs had carte blanche. They could erect a fence around their desired garden space. It could be made of bits and pieces of everything and anything imaginable—and it eventually was. They could even dig a well that tapped into the waters of Tibbetts Brook flowing several feet beneath the surface. Utilizing a fifty-gallon barrel with its bottom cut out, my grandfather knew just how to bring the water to ground level without it ever spilling over. They could build tool shacks, a horseshoe pit, and a bocce court, too. They could bring in myriad metals and woods to construct benches, tomato-plant cages, and other structures like bleachers for horseshoe-game spectators. They could relocate old furniture and a non-working refrigerator freezer to accommodate liquid refreshments and big blocks of ice. And, yes, they could throw festive parties there during holidays and on summer weekends with free-flowing alcohol on the premises. Without question these were simpler times, when no city bureaucracies interfered with any of this, and no slip-and-fall lawyers advertised on television. Today, the mere whiff of lawsuits would not permit all of the above on one’s own property—let alone on somebody else’s in a densely populated urban milieu.

I recall one of the garden men, the genial Mr. Brady, maintained his own personal shack, which was painted green. It was practically a little cottage with an old leather easy chair and couch inside, and a glass picture window of some kind. Attached to the Brady shack in back was the garden’s “bathroom,” a makeshift Portosan that consisted of a toilet seat atop a wooden stand with the requisite sized hole and a bucket down under to capture liquids and solids alike. With ample beer, wine, and spirits available during summertime parties, the bathroom was a busy place, and not for the faint of heart. And, yes, the bucket had to be emptied out on street level and into the city’s sewer system every now and then. A neighbor who lived down wind of the garden often complained that she smelled more than marigolds and tomato plants wafting in the humid summer air. As a young boy, the less than savory aspects of the garden didn’t bother me in the least. Everything was an adventure. In fact, my friend Johnny and I made a concoction on the garden grounds, if memory serves, consisting of our urines, rotten tomatoes, and other truly decaying and disgusting stuff found in the garden—and the more awful the better.

It was simpler times at this Bronx locale when, during the daylight hours, I often heard horseshoes clanking against their stakes, and occasional cheers rising for the ringers. And after sunset, with a party still going strong on garden terra firma, I would gaze from my vantage point directly across the street into a pitch-black canvass punctuated by only a few flickers of candlelight and lit cigarettes. And every now and then, I’d hear a local bus driver named Jean singing to the night: “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” Jean was renowned for crooning the songs of Ireland, and also for the time he picked up my father during a snowstorm while navigating his Broadway to Riverdale bus route and dropped him off at our front door—on a Kingsbridge back street a couple of blocks off his prescribed course. Yet another action, I daresay, lost to simpler times.

(Photo from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

Of Late I Think of the Spaldeen

(Originally published 6/23/11)

During a recent stroll down memory lane, I unearthed an interesting tidbit of information. I knew that the Spalding Company, sometime in 1999, reintroduced to the marketplace what my contemporaries and I—once upon a time—fondly called a “spaldeen.” Sadly, this formerly ubiquitous and amazingly versatile, high-bouncing rubber ball was discontinued in 1979, a casualty of waning consumer interest and a baby boom gone bust. I was, however, unaware that the manufacturer had subsequently trademarked the ball’s illustrious nickname. So, technically—since I don't have a TM symbol at my disposal—I should be capitalizing Spaldeen.

But since this blog permits me to work from my own stylebook—unlike my corporate masters—spaldeen will remain lowercase in perpetuity as a well-earned tribute to the urban youth of yesteryear who played with the ball. To the generations of youngsters who coined the nickname more than a half century ago and followed this bouncing ball to so, so, so many intriguing places, the spaldeen belongs to you. But let’s give credit where credit is due. Upon the ball’s reintroduction after a two-decade hiatus, the Spalding Company valiantly endeavored to teach a new generation a few old tricks, as it were, by familiarizing them with the myriad games played in the past with this multifaceted rubber ball. (It is widely believed, by the way, that one particular New York City outer-borough accent perpetually mispronounced “Spalding”—the company named stamped on the pink and pleasantly rubber-scented ball—as “spaldeen.” And, as they say, the rest is history.)

Plucking out a fresh spaldeen from a plastic container atop the counter of Bill’s Friendly Spot—famous for both its delicious egg creams and not especially congenial atmosphere—was a familiar ritual for many of us in the old neighborhood. Aside from the legendary game of stickball, I could rattle off several others that I played with a spaldeen: Box Ball, Box Baseball, Curb Ball, Stoop Ball, Ace-King-Queen, SPUD, and Hit the Stick.

A couple of the games on a YouTube loop in my brain are true originals, unique to the concrete backyard lay of the land where I grew up. One was dubbed “Single, Double, Triple,” which involved tossing a spaldeen against the back wall of a three-family brick house on Tibbett Avenue, with an opponent stationed in the backyard of a three-family brick house on Corlear Avenue. A spaldeen that wasn’t caught in the air could either be a single (one bounce), double (two bounce), triple (three bounce), etc. Another progeny of our singular topography was simply called “Throw It Against the Wall.” It necessitated throwing—yes—a spaldeen against a patchwork cemented wall, with an opponent fielding everything that came off of it from pop flies to line drives to ground balls. It’s actually a little too byzantine to explain here without visuals, but, suffice it to say, it was the game neighbors and I played more than any other and longer than any other—into the early 1980s, in fact, even after the spaldeen was temporarily consigned to the ash heap of history and many of us were, chronologically at least, adults. We used tennis balls by then. Spaldeens, after all, were originally reject tennis balls sold dirt-cheap to wholesalers.

I really hate to end on a sour note here, but the Spalding Company's best laid plans of bringing back the spaldeen, and returning it to its former glory, have been largely unsuccessful. Most of the ball’s current sales end up on nostalgic baby boomers’ curio shelves, and not in the hands of boys and girls out and about on concrete or asphalt playing games that little people played for generations. I'm not likely to spy local boys playing Box Ball anytime soon, or girls playing Composition. “Composition letter S, may I repeat the letter S, because I like the letter S, spaldeen begins with the letter S.”

Come to the Front Desk Please

Once upon a time, I was summoned to jury service. Like clockwork every two years. I never shirked my civic responsibility and once sat as a juror in a criminal trial. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bronx County jury-duty experience was a bit different from today’s, I discovered, when I received a summons—my first in three decades—last month. For starters, twenty-first century technology didn’t exist back then. Clerks weren’t behind bullet-proof glass with laptops and scanners at their disposal. Fittingly, my service played out in a newer building—the glass-paneled “Hall of Justice”—and not the aging, main county courthouse on the Grand Concourse. The latter, where I previously served faithfully, is still operational, but no longer directly behind the since demolished and rebuilt Yankee Stadium. Changes on many fronts.

So, not only was I in a more modern location for jury duty, but I was subject to a more modern orientation. Thirty years ago, prospective jurors were lectured—hectored even—that jury duty was a duty. Employers were not obligated to pay their employees while serving—and don’t you forget it! Accept the responsibility and be responsible, including showing up on time. There was zero tolerance for tardiness. “You’ll be turned around and sent home,” the jury clerk intoned. “And marked absent and absent for the entire day.” Fast forward to the present and lateness, it seems, is no big deal. People were checking in more than an hour late without penalty.

Nowadays, when entering any government-related building, the first thing that leaps out at you is the pre-entry screening process: metal detectors and the wand. My last jury-duty date—before this year—was in April,1993, when folks came and went as they pleased at the courthouse. No metal detection required. In fact, a memorable line from yesteryear’s orientation was “Anyone carrying a gun, come to the front desk please.” This command never failed to elicit chuckles from prospective jurors. The orientation of the past, too, was devoid of contemporary identity gibberish and sans—believe or not—any mention of “non-binary.” The current male-female bathroom situations in the “Hall of Justice” mirror the times, I suppose—i.e., one can call on whichever biffy aligns with his/her/preferred pronoun “gender identity.” What could possibly go wrong?

This go-round, I was summoned for one voir dere, where the judge and respective lawyers ask questions of prospective jurors. A panel of sixty or so men and women was brought to a courtroom in pre-trial of a man charged with murder in the first degree. What was conspicuously at odds from past voir dere’s, I thought, was the initial query posed to the assemblage: Is there anyone who would find it impossible to sit for an approximate one-month trial? Save for twelve individuals, including yours truly, the remaining cast raised their hands and were excused no questions asked. This was once a pause-button matter. On a case-by-case basis, it necessitated approaching the bench and conferring in private with often unsympathetic judges and attorneys.

But that was then and this is now. After thinning the herd, the twelve of us were questioned—with the aid of a shared Ronco cordless microphone—for possible selection to the jury. In the end—out of approximately five-dozen people called for the panel—not a solitary soul was selected. We were all dismissed, too, after serving two days on jury duty and wouldn’t be summoned again in the Bronx for at least six years. That’s what the powers-that-be said.

What, pray tell, has changed? The numbers don’t add up. Two days’ service, mass dismissals without a fuss, and see you in six years. I served for nine days and sat through five voir deres—never picked for an actual jury—in my first jury-duty tour, then five days after that and three days after that. Lastly, I sat through a week-long trial as a juror. Pay was $14/day plus carfare back then. Today, it’s $40/day, no carfare, and the bathroom of your choice. Oh, did I mention the big screen TVs in the jury assembly room? I hadn’t seen a Family Feud episode since Richard Dawson hosted.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stickball Bat

(Originally published on 6/10/11)

Stickball has been called the “poor man’s baseball.” An urban game largely associated with the streets of New York and some of its gritty metropolitan neighbors, like Jersey City, it’s the stuff of legend. Believed to have initially taken flight in the early 1920s, stickball was played on the streets with a broom handle and a rubber ball colloquially known as a “spaldeen.” Manhole covers served as bases and key game markers.

But like virtually every city street game from the past, stickball sightings are exceedingly rare these days. I can honestly say that my generation was the last to play it faithfully and informally in neighborhood after neighborhood—and in various incarnations, too—throughout the spring and summer months. My father and his pals played countless stickball games in the 1940s and 1950s on the local streets of Kingsbridge in the Bronx. In sharp contrast with today's mega-congestion, the streets were then lightly trafficked with very few parked cars to get in the way. From the photographic evidence in my possession, guys sometimes sported dress clothes and dress shoes while taking their cuts and sprinting around from sewer to sewer. Apparently, there was no such thing as going home and changing into more appropriate attire after work. It was play ball. And, also, people dressed up and remained dressed up on Sundays back then, stickball game or not.

By the time I came of stickball age, games were still played on the streets. Slowly but surely, though, a newer stickball incarnation took hold. It involved fast-pitching against a wall with a spray painted or chalk-outlined—and eventually even masking-taped—strike-zone box.

The combined one-two punch of youthful love of the game and corresponding lack of disposable income inspired my stickball compatriots, on occasion, to fish the neighborhood sewers for spaldeens—the ones that got away. Spaldeens on the streets were ubiquitous during my boyhood in the 1960s and 1970s and employed for a variety of purposes. Not surprisingly, a fair share of them inevitably found their ways into the four corner sewers at intersecting streets. Were it not for a long-handled fishing net, these landings might have been the spaldeens' final-resting places. Admittedly, the balls were foul-smelling and quite grimy to touch after we plucked them out of the sewers' putrid muck, and only marginally improved after we thoroughly hosed them down. Hand sanitizers would have come in handy in a time before hand sanitizers.

My stickball group eventually switched to tennis balls as our preferred orbs, but Bill Jr. of Bill’s Friendly Spot, a local candy store, chastised us when we returned broken bats bought from him. “How many times do I have to tell you guys!" he said. "You can’t use tennis balls with them!” The price we paid for purchasing stickball bats solely for their coolly painted yellows, reds, and blues were lectures from a cantankerous shopkeeper and no refunds to boot.

We once thought we had solved our stickball bat dilemma for all time with an aluminum broom handle taken from my mother’s mop. However, that thing was dinged, dented, and irreparably distorted in very short order. We likewise surmised that a super-thick wooden flagpole was a stickball bat godsend, but it, too, just wasn't up to the task. Shattering after only a couple of innings of play, the pole’s visible thickness evidently didn’t equate with its denseness. And one neighbor family was without a flagpole.

Eventually, a friend and stickball devotee discovered a very strong broom handle—as lean and mean as they came—at his family’s fish store. Our bat problems were forevermore solved—through, in fact, the very last game we played at nearby John F. Kennedy High School, the ideal locale for a stickball game. As is so often the case with so many things in life, we didn't realize at the time that our very last stickball game would be our very last—and the end of an era, too.

(Photos from the personal collection of Nicholas Nigro)

It’s Not Your Grandfather’s School Cafeteria Anymore

(Originally published 1/20/16)

I have very few fond memories of high school. One, however, is the institution of fine learning’s cafeteria. Of course, I was a teenager back then—in the colorfully scintillating 1970s—with teen culinary tastes and peculiar gastronomic desires. I salivated over certain foods then that might very well leave me cold today. I truly don’t know if I’d appreciate the school’s exceptionally gooey Friday “grandma slices” of pizza or cardboard-textured Wednesday roast beef wedges (with optional Au jus)—personal favorites—as much now as I did when Jimmy Carter was president. I wonder, too, how my adult palate would take to the “Mashed Pot” served with the aforementioned roast beef wedge. Yes, that’s what the space-challenged cafeteria special board read every Wednesday. Were he still among the living, Cardinal Francis Spellman might have cried foul.

Anyway, while perusing my alma mater’s website recently, I came upon a link to its “cafeteria menu,” which I thought strange. When I clicked on it, a PDF file opened up with this week’s—Monday through Friday—menu. And it was the polar opposite of what I recall with such fondness. I remember that in addition to the daily specials, there was an always and every-day alternative: the ubiquitous hot dog. Frankfurters were thirty-five cents when I was a freshman; fifty cents, when I was a senior. Believe me: They were worth every penny and then some.

Suffice it to say: There are no dogs on today’s cafeteria menu. In fact, the place has been dubbed a “café” now and is run by a culinary outfit. (I won't hazard a guess as to what happened to all the cafeteria ladies.) This contemporary bill of fare features categories like “Chef’s Table,” “Jump Asian,” and “Tuscan Bistro.” Icons identify which foods are gluten free, vegetarian, and vegan. The vegetarian side dish for January 20, 2016 was “Risi e Bisi Rice, Roasted Zucchini, and Tomatoes.” The only thing resembling a vegetable—outside of potatoes—that I recollect eating in the school cafeteria was sauerkraut on my hot dog. It was the first and last time I sampled that shredded cabbage mush. Sauerkraut, though, taught me a valuable lesson: Appealing aromas don’t necessarily translate into taste sensations, particularly when they turn a perfectly edible wiener roll into a grotesque sponge. (The cafeteria ladies had to keep the lunch lines moving. Draining the sauerkraut before putting it atop the frankfurter didn’t happen.)

So, a long time ago on a Wednesday afternoon in wintertime, I enjoyed a roast beef wedge—with Au jus—and a mashed pot side in my school cafeteria. Today, I could have ordered “Chicken Scallopini Scampi,” “Hunan Chicken and Hong Sue Pork,” and “Fruited Barley Lentil Soup.” I could also have a refillable debit card to pay for it—a lunchtime E-Z pass. For sure: It’s not your grandfather’s school cafeteria anymore. Trouble is: I’m now the grandfather. How did that happen?